Last week, Pete showed us How to publish a photo on Wikipedia. Here’s another easy and important thing you can do: Release your Flickr photos under a Creative Commons license that allows derivative works and commercial use. Flickr enables users to share their work with others by publishing images under a Creative Commons license. Many people choose a CC license that prohibits commercial use, thinking that they don’t want their beautiful photos of Mount Hood to show up on a postcard or in a Mazda commercial. What they don’t realize is that they are also preventing their work from showing up on Wikipedia.

When Wikiproject Oregon editors want to add an image to the article, they frequently go rummaging through the wonderful world of Flickr looking for Creative Commons photos. Nothing beats stumbling across a photostream — like Marc Shandro, eyeliam, mulmatsherm, pfly, or atul666 — full of commons-licensed Oregon photos. We need more of these! If you don’t want pictures of your kids showing up on in travel brochures, you can always choose to license some of your photos under a CC-BY-SA or CC-BY license, while reserving additional rights on more personal and private photos. Flickr’s organizer tool makes it easy to apply licenses to large batches of photos at a time. Make sure you tag and caption your photos well so that editors can find them easily for Wikipedia, identifying location, geographic features, buildings, notable people, and plant and animal species if possible.

Here’s another thing we should do. Let’s start a photo pool called “Oregon Commons.” Flickr already has many great pools like Oregon and Northwest Outdoors, featuring the best Oregon images. Unfortunately, the Flickr search engine doesn’t provide an easy way to search within those pools for Creative Commons-licensed images. What we need is a pool for the best Oregon photos released under CC-BY and CC-BY-SA licenses. We could send notices to the members of those other pools inviting them to join our pool and teaching them how to license images so that they can be used on Wikipedia. And over time we’ll build up a useful resource. Who wants to take the lead?

UPDATE: More instructions in the comments below. In Flickr’s terminology, the CC-BY license is “Attribution Creative Commons” and CC-BY-SA is “Attribution-ShareAlike Creative Commons.” These are the only two licenses compatible with Wikipedia.